Happy Vacation!

I hope your children are enjoying the first few days of their vacation!  Hopefully we get a few sunny breaks this week.

Last week in Writing, we began our April unit: poetry.  We kicked off our unit on Monday by enjoying our writing block outside.  It was a beautiful day which worked out really well for our nature observations.  Children sat in a spot by themselves for about twenty minutes and recorded everything they heard, saw, felt, and smelled (we left out taste). 

 On Tuesday, we were so lucky to have Ms. Honan teach our writing lesson!  She used the children's notes from Monday's nature observations to teach children how to write poems.  Ms. Honan wrote several poems together with the class then all the children went back to their seats and wrote their own nature poems.  Ms.  Honan and I were very impressed with their first day of poetry writing!

The children also spent a chunk of their writing time last week listening to me read aloud poetry.  The children learned that although many poems rhyme, many poems do not rhyme.  A poem does not need to rhyme to be a poem.

Last week in Reading we:

• learned that when i is the only vowel in a word and it's in the middle of a word, it usually makes the short vowel sound heard in "him." 
• reviewed the different reasons a reader rereads text.  The children came up with reasons why they reread.  Reasons included: to learn more about a topic, to remember something, to learn a word that was tricky for you, and to listen for a rhyming or repeating pattern.
• learned about quotation marks and an ellipsis.  

Last week in Math we:

• learned about seconds as a unit of time and discussed different tools that keep track of seconds.  Different children moved across the room in a certain way (hopping, toe-to-heel steps, etc.) as we used a timer to keep track of the number of seconds it took that child to cross the room.
• Used calculators to practice skip-counting by 2s, 5s, and 10s.  Boy, do they love those calculators!!
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• looked at pictures of butterflies to come to the conclusion that butterfly wings are symmetrical.  Each child then designed and painted a butterfly with symmetrical wings (They did the best they could do with this task!).  When we get back from vacation we will write butterfly poems.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
   
  
  
  One final part of our week was that every child shared his/her all-about poster with the rest of the class.  They were all so proud of their work, as they all should have been.  I was so impressed with the way all the posters turned out.  The children did a fabulous job presenting their posters to their peers.  As listeners, the children were very respectful and gave each other positive feedback about their work.  The slideshow below shows each child sharing his/her poster.